Konrad Werner - The Embodied Philosopher: Living in Pursuit of Boundary Questions

This series brings together work that takes cognitive science in new directions. For many years, philosophical contributions to the field of cognitive science came primarily from theorists with commitments to physical reductionism, neurocentrism, and a representationalist model of the mind. However, over the last two decades, a rich literature that challenges these traditional views has emerged. According to so-called 4E approaches, the mind is embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. Cognition, emotion, and consciousness are not best understood as comprised of brainbound representational mechanisms, but rather as dynamic, embodied, action-oriented processes that sometimes extend beyond the human body. Such work often draws from phenomenology and dynamic systems theory to rethink the nature of cognition, characterizing it in terms of the embodied activity of an affectively attuned organism embedded in its social world. In recent years, theorists have begun to utilize 4E approaches to investigate questions in philosophy of psychiatry, moral psychology, ethics, and political philosophy. To foster this growing interest in rethinking traditional philosophical notions of cognition using phenomenology, dynamic systems theory, and 4E approaches, we dedicate this series to New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science.

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Competence in philosophy can be regarded as a desirable intellectual virtue . Philosophers are skilled at asking questions that usually do not come to mind and clarifying issues that may otherwise be blurred. For example, Michael Dummett notes that while the optician provides us with spectacles that bring all that we see into sharper focus, the philosopher aims to perform a similar service in respect of our thinking about reality (Dummett, , p. xiii).

In both cases, the purpose is to elicit the fundamental, yet unnoticed, factors shaping our worldviews. This peculiar skill , the capacity to problematize, first in general and then specifically in philosophy, is the subject matter of this book. I shall explore its nature and functioning. This will lead me to a certain conception of why one group of animals, mostly engaged in dealing with the needs they share with other living creatures , thus in maintaining their precarious autonomy , is also engaged in the pursuit of problematizing , including philosophical reflection. I mean humansone might add of course (Humans, of course!), but actually there is no reason to do that. In principle, this could have been any lineage.

Now, crucially, this appeal to evolution, this talk of living creatures , is by no means mere decorum, a fancy way of getting the reader interested. I mean it technically. The aim of this book is to set forth an account of what the pursuit of problematizing in general, and the pursuit of philosophizing in particular is, qua undertaken by a living system coupled with its surroundings (this task is fulfilled in Chap. , following various preparatory investigations). Living creatures do various things, not only to survive, but also to make sense of the world they live in, as Francisco Varela puts it, and some of them do philosophize. Why? How do they manage it? How is this specific and quite peculiar endeavor related to the way in which the world is experienced by them? What is it like to philosophize? These are our concerns.

The concerns are meta-philosophical, yet in this book they are approached from a perspective that might be called bottom-up, which means that we shall try to reconstruct first how philosophizing emerges from and finds itself within the actual experiences of conscious, self-reflective subjects ; and second, how the actual processes of maintaining ones precarious autonomy and ones environmental interactions have given rise to the peculiar intellectual endeavor called philosophy.

All that said, philosophizing can also be a risky endeavor due to the highly peculiar nature of philosophical questions and claims. Alongside the appreciation philosophy has been shown, some ingredients of philosophy have also been seen as nonsense. We shall examine these claims, made by Bertrand Russell , Ludwig Wittgenstein , and Rudolf Carnap , among others. The point is not to dismiss them, but to learn from them.